It has long been a goal of the Chinese leadership to see the national currency, the yuan, play a greater role in international finance. The internationalization of the yuan has been pursued through many initiatives and strategies, most recently in relation to the IMF and the inclusion of the yuan in a “basket” of currencies underpinning Special Drawing Rights. Internationalization has doubtless been delayed by relative non-convertibility and China's state-run financial system, amongst other factors. As matters are liberalized on the financial front, so it becomes more credible for the yuan to play the global role that would be expected of the currency of the world's largest trading nation, the world's largest manufacturing nation, and the world's second largest economy. But the year 2018 has seen a dramatic break with this SDR-focused strategy, and its replacement by a strategy that targets the oil market – the world's largest commodity market, where trading in US dollars has been near-universal for decades.

The Sewol ferry carrying 476 passengers including a group of high school students on a field trip to Jeju Island capsized on April 16, 2014, and sank to the bottom of the sea off Korea's southern coast. Most of the crew, including the captain, were rescued by the Korean coast guard. Some of the passengers, who happened to be on the deck or escaped soon after the capsizing, were saved by fishing boats and commercial vessels that came before the ROK Coast Guard or Navy. 304 passengers, however, were trapped inside and drowned.

Introduction

Maeda Akira is a law professor at Tokyo Zokei University. He recently edited a volume of writing on theories of ‘hate speech’, and has been an active participant in the activist and scholarly ‘justice for comfort women’ movement since its inception in Japan in the early 1990s. In December 2015, Maeda published a series of blog posts criticising a public statement issued, initially, by 54 mostly Japanese and American academics in November 2015. This public statement was introduced at a press conference on the 26th, and published in the Asahi Shimbun on the 27th. Among its signatories were Oe Kenzaburo, Kono Yohei, Andrew Gordon, Peter Duus, and Ueno Chizuko. The group maintains a multilingual website as a show of ongoing protest.

The essay explores Japan's policies of containing infection without heavy reliance on legally imposed lockdowns or digital surveillance. It examines the ‘social measures’ that local governments and the Ministry of Health relied on, including consistent public health messaging, contact tracing, education, with a focus on behavior modification. The pandemic worldwide has highlighted the importance of society in addition to the state in controlling infection. This article points out the benefits of this form of social control as well as its trade-offs, including stress concerning social expectations, informal forms of social control, and incidences of harassment and discrimination against the diseased.

The Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) occupies an integral position in the memory politics of the People's Republic of China (PRC). In recent years, dominant representations of the war create a memory discourse which portrays the heroic triumph of the Chinese people led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) over Japan. This article shows how the war has been remembered from the victory of the Communist revolution in 1949 to the present in the PRC. It contributes to the debate on the effectiveness and limitations of the monopoly of war memory by the CCP.

This essay argues that modes of conceptualizing global-local entanglements provide a useful lens for looking at the different ways Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects localize in BRI-host countries. The essay draws on recent work on George Ritzer to examine examples of BRI projects where global norms and practices are locally conceived and controlled, in contrast to other cases where the projects barely reflect local culture. Examples of Serbia and Hungary are provided to illuminate these points.

Compelling women's fiction in Japan hardly began with its two brightest contemporary stars, Kawakami Mieko and Murata Sayaka. Tawada Yoko won the Akutagawa Prize back in 1993 and her work is widely read outside Japan (Tawada has long lived in Germany and writes in German and Japanese). Ogawa Yoko won in 1990 for her novel Pregnancy Diary (Ninshin karendaa, 妊娠 カレンダー). In 2004 the Akutagawa went to two young women, Wataya Risa (19) and Kanehara Hitomi (20). There have been English translations of fiction by Japanese women for decades.

There are two main ways Russian propaganda reaches Japan: (a) the social media accounts of official institutions, such as the Russian Embassy, or Russian state-linked media outlets, such as Sputnik, and (b) pro-Russian Japanese political actors who willingly (or unwillingly) spread disinformation and display a clear pro-Kremlin bias. These actors justify the Russian invasion of Ukraine and repeat the Russian view of the war with various objectives in mind, primarily serving their own interests. By utilizing corpus analysis and qualitative examination of social media data, this article explores how Russian propaganda and a pro-Russian stance are effectively connected with and incorporated into the discursive strategies of political actors of the Japanese Far-Right.

In recent years, academic research and investigative reports have brought to light several cases of computational propaganda (i.e. orchestrated attempts to manipulate public opinion or the outcome of elections via social media), as well as proof that filter algorithms amplify right-wing conservative content on Japanese social media. Piecing together the scattered pieces of a puzzle, this article summarizes recent findings from various disciplines and provides an overview of the mechanisms and potential scope of computational propaganda in politics. Although there is no conclusive evidence of who is behind this anonymous activity, an analysis of these findings demonstrates increasing circumstantial evidence that certain factions of the LDP are actively using computational propaganda, either by commissioning external contractors or through its online support group, J-NSC, thereby condoning and appealing to anonymous Internet right-wingers (netto uyo). The concluding discussion assesses the effects and consequences of computational propaganda on the political sphere in contemporary Japan.

Since 2016 over one million Chinese civil servants have been ordered to spend a series of weeks visiting assigned Turkic Muslim “relatives.” These mostly Han urbanites have been tasked with instructing Uyghur and Kazakh farmers in political ideology and subjecting them to tests of Chinese nationalism and Han cultural assimilation. When they occupy the homes of their Turkic “relatives” they assess whether or not they should be sent into the mass “reeducation” camp system. Drawing on ethnographic field research, interviews and state documents, this essay argues that the systematic normalization of state-directed violent paternalism has produced a new kind of banality in Turkic minority experiences of unfreedom.

There are many ways that an economy can be greened. Building vast new renewable energy manufacturing industries is one pathway – as pioneered by China. Deploying extensive renewable power generation systems is another pathway – as demonstrated by Germany with its Energiewende. Yet another route is pursuing R&D led strategies and strategic initiatives via the military, as shown by the US. Now Korea demonstrates another pathway, one based on liberalization of its power generation system (to promote competition) and development of the IT-enabling of its electric power grid (smart grid) with a characteristic modular approach to smart grid construction, utilizing microgrids.